College dropouts....they really changed the world

Is school necessary for success? These self-made billionaires listed below seem to suggest that talent, attitude, hard work, and lots of luck seem to be the vital ingredients of success - not college (or even high school) degrees. Here are some very, very rich people (all billionaires, actually) who dropped out of school:

Bill Gates. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft. (at one point, before the Internet bubble burst, he was worth over $100 billion, making him the world’s first centibillionaire!) Bill Gates is probably also the world’s most famous college drop-out. Gates dropped out of Harvard to work on his start-up company, then called Micro-Soft in 1975, when he was just 19 years old. Under his shrewd (though other people may call it predatory and unlawful) business practices, Gates grew Microsoft into a behemoth (and depending on your point of view, hated) corporation. Gates left day-to-day operations at Microsoft to devote more time into philantrophic endeavor, namely the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is currently the second largest charitable foundation in the world.

Sheldon Adelson. Sheldon Adelson made his fortunes in Las Vegas doing casino and real estate development. Adelson grew up poor in Boston (his father drove a taxi and his mother ran a knitting store) and began working selling newspaper at street corners. By the time he was 16, Adelson owned his first business - and he didn’t stop there: Adelson had since created and grew over 50 different companies! The one thing this serial entrepreneur didn’t do was graduate from college: Adelson dropped out of City College of New York.

Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison proved that you can overcome a rocky childhood (he was born to a 19-year-old unwed mother who gave him up for adoption to a distant relative when he was just 9 months old) to become successful. Actually, make that very successful: Ellison founded the database giant Oracle with just $2,000 in 1977 at 33 years old. After a rocky start and various crises (including a battle with another database company Informix, which ended with their CEO Phil White being thrown in jail), Oracle became the second largest software company in the world. Ellison dropped out his sophomore year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then dropped out again after just one quarter at the University of Chicago.

Li Ka-Shing. Hong Kong self-made billionaire Li Ka-Shing When he was just 12 years old, Li and his family fled to Hong Kong when Japan invaded China. When he was 15, Li’s father died and he was forced to drop out of high school to support his family. Li got his start as a salesman selling watches at his uncle’s store, and soon proved to be a diligent worker: he worked 16 hour days, visited customers during the day and worked at the factory at night. Determined to better himself, Li even found a tutor to teach him English every night! When he was 21, Li opened a plastic manufacturing company and grew his business by selling high quality plastic flowers at bargain prices. When Li was 30, he accidentally got into real estate because he couldn’t renew the lease for his factory and was forced to purchase and develop a site himself. From there, Li diversified into electronics, telecommunications, retails, ports, and even power and electricity. Li is also noted for his philantrophy: he gave millions to various universities and disaster-relief. All in all, not bad for a high school drop-out.

Roman Abramovich. Abramovich’s business got started in the late 1980s when then Soviet President Michael Gorbachev’s reform allowed the openings of small private businesses. His road to riches opened up when he acquired assets cheaply during Boris Yeltsin’s privatization of state companies in the mid 1990s. Abramovich is not afraid of spending money: he’s actually more well known in the United Kingdom as being the owner of the football (soccer) club Chelsea, as well as numerous luxury yachts dubbed "the Abramovich’s Navy." We can argue about technicality here: Abramovich studied briefly at the Moscow State Auto Transport Institute before dropping out to go into business. Unlike his colleagues in this list, however, he did earn a correspondence degree from Moscow State Law Academy.

Paul Allen. Paul Allen made his fortune with Microsoft - he founded the company along with Bill Gates. When he was a teenager in high school, Allen used to sneak into the University of Washington’s computer labs (again, with Bill Gates). They were actually caught, but made a deal with the lab administrators to provide free computer help to students. Paul Allen attended Washington State University, and dropped out in his sophomore years to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston. At the time, Bill Gates was at Harvard - well, that is until Allen convinced him to drop out of school to create Microsoft.

Michael Dell. At the age of 15, Michael Dell took a brand new Apple II computer apart and rebuilt it just to see if he could - this turned out to foreshadow how Dell made his billions: by building PCs. After high school (with a lackluster record, "he’ll never go anywhere in life," said one of his teachers), Dell attended the University of Texas at Austin. In his dorm, he started to custom-build and sell computers. Dell’s computer business actually was so successful that at the age of 19 he dropped out of college to run the business full-time.

Amancio Ortega. Amancio Ortega was a son of a railway worker turned fashion-mogul and became Spain’s richest man. Ortega started out at the age of 14 as a gofer in a shirt store. At the age of 27, he started his own company to make bathrobes. Twelve years later, he opened his first store called Zara, which would become an enormously popular chain. Ortega kept a very low profile (so much so that when he did make a public appearance in 2000, it made headlines in Spanish press!) but we’re guessing it’s not because this billionaire dropped out of high school.

Carl Icahn. Is it really fair to call Carl Icahn who has a degree from Princeton University a dropout? Well, he *did* drop out of New York University School of Medicine, just before graduation because he "didn’t like working with corpses." But not being a doctor probably turned out for the better for Icahn, who is now a billionaire financier. Carl "Corporate Raider" Icahn is famous for takovers of companies (TWA, Texaco, USX) and for being the thorn in corporate management’s side (Time Warner).

Kirk Kerkorian. Self-made billionaire Kirk Kerkorian was an amateur boxer ("Rifle Right Kerkorian") and a pilot. At the age of 30, he got his start by buying a small air-charter service flying gamblers from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in 1947. Seeing opportunities in Las Vegas, Kerkorian bought land and got into the lucrative real estate / casino development. Since the 1960s, Kerkorian had bought (and sold) hot properties like the Caesars Palace, the Las Vegas Hilton, MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, and others.

Donald Newhouse. You may not know who Donald Newhouse is, but you’ve probably read his magazine: Newhouse (along with his brother Sam) built his family business into a publishing and television giant: newspapers, Condé Nast (Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Glamour), The Learning Channel, Epicurious.com, and so on. Don Newhouse dropped out of Syracuse University, although we suspect that his magazine readings and overall wealth made up for it.

François Pinault. François who? You may not recognize the name, but you’ll definitely know his products: through his retail and luxury goods holding company PPR, François Pinault owns (or has owned) Gucci, YSL, Converse sneakers, Samsonite luggage, the Vail ski resort in Colorado, and the auction house Christie’s. But don’t tell the luxury goods buyers that Pinault is a high school dropout.

Stanley Ho. Stanley Ho is called the King of Gambling for a good reason: he controlled the casino business in Macau for over 35 years because of a government-granted monopoly. Like many of his colleagues in this list, Ho’s early childhood was tough. Although his family was wealthy at one point, his father lost a lot of money in a stock market crash and went bankrupt. His father abandoned him and his elder brothers committed suicide, leaving Ho and his mother impoverished. This really made Ho one tough guy: once, he was in charge of a trade at sea when the ship was attacked by pirates, who then shot dead his partners. Ho was holding the money (the equivalent of several million dollars today), so naturally, the pirates rushed him. Undeterred, Ho got hold of a gun, shot a few people, gained control of the ship, and beat back the pirates! Although Ho was a poor student, he became the wealthiest man in Macau. In fact, his company accounts for one-third of Macau’s GDP! Not bad at all for someone who dropped out of college.

Jack Taylor If you have rented a car from Enterprise Rent-A-Car, you’ve rented a car from a college dropout. Jack Taylor sold Cadillacs (yes, he was a car salesman) before he started the auto-leasing business in 1957 when he was 34 years old (trivia: he named it after the USS Enterprise, the aircraft carrier he served on). Unlike other rental car outfits, Jack focused on the local market, i.e. specializing in renting cars to customers who need a replacement car when their own cars are in the shop. Oh, almost forgot, he dropped out of Washington University to join the Navy.

YC Wang. Can you technically label someone a dropout if he never started high school to begin with? Dunno, but this is too remarkable not to mention. Wait, there’s a billionaire here that never even set foot in high school? Yes. That’s YC Wang, a self-made Taiwanese billionaire who made his fortune in plastics and chemicals. The octagenarian is now the head of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics, one of the largest plastic manufacturers in the world. Wang was born to a tea farmer and was forced to enter the work force with only an elementary school education.

David Geffen. David Geffen, of Geffen Records, and Dreamworks SKG fame, went to the University of Texas at Austin but soon dropped out. Geffen got started working at the mailroom at a talent agency, and went on to create Asylum Records in 1971 at the tender age of 28. He went on to create Geffen Records in 1980.

Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is synonymous with Apple, the computer company that he founded, lost, and then regained. The history (or drama, if you want to call it that) of Steve Jobs as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is too long to list in details. (Okay, let’s list two: he built "blue boxes" or hacking devices that allowed people to get illegal free long distance phone calls which he then used to prank call the Pope and he once backpacked around India in search of philosophical enlightenment and came back with a bald head, and wearing traditional Indian clothing). Suffice it to say, this hacker turned billionaire did well for himself, despite having dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon after only one semester.

David Murdock. David Murdock had a tough childhood - he dropped out of high school in ninth-grade and pumped gas until he was drafted into the Army. Since then, however, life had worked out for him: Murdock did a leveraged buyout of Castle & Cooke, which then bought Dole Food Company and assumed its name. So, next time you eat a Dole pinapple, remember that the guy that owns it was a high school drop out (and by buying the product, you’re making him that much richer ).

Henry Fok. It really wasn’t Henry Fok’s fault that he dropped out of high school - Japan invaded his country of Hong Kong. Fok got his break by smuggling firearms into China during the Korean War. He later helped finance Stanley Ho (another dropout!) to get the monopoly of Macau’s gambling license. Politically very connected, Fok was rumored to be the behind-the-scenes king maker in Hong Kong politics.

Ralph Lauren. Before he was a famous fashion designer, Ralph Lauren grew up in the Bronx and worked after school to earn money to buy stylish suits (he was trendy, even at a young age!) Actually, his story goes back earlier than that: Ralph was actually born as a son to a Jewish house painter. His birth name was Ralph Lifschitz. At 16, Ralph and his brothers changed their last names to Lauren - although some say that he was denying his Jewish heritage, Ralph considered it necessary for success. Ralph Lauren went to the City College of New York studying business, but dropped out after two years. After a stint in the Army, he worked for Brooks Brothers as a salesman and created the label Polo, then a necktie business. Ralph never attended fashion school, which didn’t hurt him any.

Richard Branson. Virgin’s Richard Branson is multi billioniar and that’s not too shabby for a guy who didn’t even finish high school. Branson suffered from dyslexia and dropped out of high school at 16 years of age. What he lacked in schooling, however, he made up in curiosity and entrepreneur zeal - when he was 15, he had started two business ventures: growing Christmas trees and raising parrots! When he was 17, Branson opened his first charity and started his first record business. Along with Nik Powell, Branson opened a small record store in London called "Virgin." Virgin became a veritable giant (branching out into things like airways, telecommunication and so forth) and Branson was knighted in 1999 for "services to entrepreneurship." So, next time you want to call him a high school dropout, remember that it’s "Sir" high school dropout to you.

Before you drop out of college (or God forbid, high school), consider that these people are the exceptions to the rule - for every one who made it, there are probably millions of other dropouts whose life turned out for the worse because they dropped out of school.